Pre-treatment serum albumin and mutational burden as biomarkers of response to immune checkpoint blockade

Seong-Keun Yoo; Diego Chowell; Cristina Valero; Luc G T Morris; Timothy A Chan

doi:10.1038/s41698-022-00267-7

Pre-treatment serum albumin and mutational burden as biomarkers of response to immune checkpoint blockade

NPJ Precis Oncol. 2022 Apr 7;6(1):23. doi: 10.1038/s41698-022-00267-7.

Authors

Seong-Keun Yoo^#^{1

2}, Diego Chowell^#^{2

3

4}, Cristina Valero⁵, Luc G T Morris⁵, Timothy A Chan^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Immunotherapy and Precision Immuno-Oncology, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, 44195, USA.
² The Precision Immunology Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, 10029, USA.
³ The Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, 10029, USA.
⁴ Department of Oncological Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, 10029, USA.
⁵ Department of Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, 10065, USA.
⁶ Center for Immunotherapy and Precision Immuno-Oncology, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, 44195, USA. chant2@ccf.org.
⁷ Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, 44106, USA. chant2@ccf.org.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The effects of cytokine and protein stabilizing carriers, such as serum albumin, on tumor response to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) is not well understood. By examining 1714 patients across 16 cancer types, we found that high pretreatment serum albumin level predicts favorable tumor radiographic response following ICB treatment in a dose-dependent fashion. Serum albumin is a candidate biomarker that can be combined with tumor mutational burden (TMB) for additional predictive capacity, and the tumor response rate to ICB was ~49% in the albumin-high/TMB-high group.

Abstract

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